23 MY owner here - I have been very unimpressed with the automatic wipers in my car, especially in intermittent rain/water thrown up from the car in front, or snowy conditions/lots of salt on the road - they seem to either want to wipe like crazy and smear the windshield, or they never trigger when most of the windshield is covered. This wouldn't be quite as annoying except that the wiper interface isn't physical, and having to reach over to the touch screen to change wiper speed when you're already in a reduced visibility situation is not a great UI! I basically end up just pressing the one physical button to trigger a one-off windshield wipe a lot.
This was a pretty big disappointment for me coming from a 2005 (!) Audi A4 which has auto wipers that work _almost_ flawlessly (and has a physical adjustment on the stalk when I need to override).
I'm very much not a Tesla hater - overall I _love_ the car. I just wish a few details were different (speedometer & nav more directly in line of site, physical controls for windshield wipers, CarPlay integration). I've just been kinda shocked how bad the auto wipers are for a brand new car.
Adaptive Cruise works well for me though, although I enjoy the act of driving so I don't use it all that often other than long straight highways.
- wipers - button at the end of left side stalk, half press for single wipe, full press for wash. Some seconds after this the left thumb wheel left/right can be used to adjust wiper speed (this last has come as a sw update within this year).
Wiper automation/rain sensing on Tesla is in general rather poor, I wish they would give up on their camera ideology for reliable sensors or at least made the sw good.
- adaptive cruise control is single down pull on right stalk. With lane keeping activated by a double pull. Speed adjusted with scrolling right thumb wheel and distance right thumb wheel left/right.
Yeah they broke the auto wipers in a past models update when they decided cameras were enough and got rid of the $1 rain sensor. The broken auto wipers weren't a deal breaker till the recent change to remove the stalk completely though.
Wipers are a critical safety item. There should be a way to activate them manually, in fact I thought this was a legal requirement in the USA but perhaps I'm mistaken.
Also I can control them from the wheel. IMO they should be able to be controlled by the wheel in all vehicles, though I know that is not currently the case.
For whatever its worth, you can trigger the wipers with the left driving stalk, and they are by default in "automatic" mode, which causes them to kick on when the behind-the-windshield camera detects visibility issues through the glass.
I would suspect, if one looked into the details of this case, the fact that the wipers can be adjusted in other ways than just the touchscreen was probably a deciding factor against the driver. At any rate, it's always the drivers fault if they do not know how to operate the vehicle they're driving safely.
All this said, the little UI for the wiper controls is really small and fiddly.
The stalk wiper control is awkward and has two modes, trigger wipers once, and trigger wipers once with fluid spray. Both modes trigger a modal on the touchscreen that allows speed control for the wipers in the late version of the software. It did not always do this. It was incredibly awkward to control the wipers when the left modal wasn't implemented. I live in a rainy climate and was very unsatisfied with the controls before the improvements.
As that tweet pretty clearly says, what they're rolling out soon is highway autosteer (a.k.a. automatic lane keeping) and automatic parallel parking. "Summon" mode (having the car drive to you by itself) is not coming any time soon.
While the over-the-air update is novel, these features all exist on current luxury and even some middle class vehicles as part of driver assistance option packages.
They're typically called Lane Keeping Assistant, Adaptive Cruise Control, Blindspot Warning, Automated Parking, Traffic Sign Recognition, etc.
The emergency steering bit is interesting, though no further details are provided, as it requires the car to ensure that there is a safe space to steer into, which is dicey for a forward collision emergency braking system, so I'd conjecture it is connected to the side collision warning, and allows collision avoidance if there is enough space in the current lane.
It sounds like the key fob did work as others pointed out. However I'm sure there are still lots of unfinished things. When I was out in Chicago with my buddy late last year I got to drive the updated Model S and I noticed the windshield wipers wouldn't come on automatically whenever it rained. After digging through the menu we found a thing that said said something like "feature coming soon" for automatic wipers. Kinda sucks to not have feature a lot of very entry level luxury-ish cars have. Overall the tech is cool and I bet they offer a lot more future functionality through patching. Just feels like they are always in a rush to launch to get some cash in the door and they go with "that will do for now" as the solution.
I hear they got a patch out around last new years to finally address this.
Great video. Tesla cars would just be so much better with these, it's kind of infuriating.
(Also the rear cross alert pings from my old (MT Sedan) Mazda 3 Astina '14 is something I miss greatly.)
Having said that, the wipers in my LR3'22 work pretty well and I am not really giving it that much thought.
I keep the area clean and wipe the blades down regularly. I do like how easy it is to engage the wiper service mode to be able to lift the blades; no manual required.
There was a time when perhaps I didn't keep the area that clean and found I couldn't really use cruise control on a highway drive without the wipers going nuts in the dry, fortunately it's been a while since I've experienced that - upgraded behaviour, perhaps.
That seems crazy that automatic windshield wipers aren't enabled... my 2008 Honda Civic has those!
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